Lindsay Crandall captures one of my biggest fears and joys as a parent — watching a child embrace the written word:

The written word is a bit more subtle. It tends to be more personal, which is why it’s easier to place a camera in my daughter’s hands and make her into a photographer than a pencil and paper to make her into a writer. I can teach her the alphabet song, how to recognize letters and their sounds, and what it means to put those letters together in a meaningful way, but that won’t necessarily give her a love for words. She has to find that herself, and it’s too early in her life to know if she will.

This was encouraging to me. I worry that all this tv watching, video game playing, music be-boping-to is harmful, but this study suggests that kids are actually becoming more imaginative. Particularly interesting to think about:

He recalls his own “stupidity” when his son showed a keen – and independent – interest in chess at the tender age of six. Prof. Walters ran out and bought him a manual. “He was reading by then, so I gave it to him. That just killed it. It turned it into schoolwork. There’s a difference between intrinsic and extrinsic interest: the kinds of things you’d do on your own because they’re self-rewarding, as opposed to somebody on the outside telling you, ‘Okay, this is how you should do it.’”

I was lying on the floor pushing Thomas the Tank Engine around his wooden track when I realized my young son had been speaking to me for the past 30 seconds, but I hadn’t listened to a word he had said. Instead, I was too preoccupied…

In her book Real Love for Real Life, Andi contends that caregiving is more than a second-tier Christian duty. It is a “grand invitation to serve others with beauty, imagination, and love to which God calls us.”

A raised garden as an object lesson in Christian character. My garden feels more like an object lesson in futility, but we’re going through Ecclesiastes at church… so our garden IS a scriptural lesson after all.